“What are these supposed to be?” she asked in frustration.
“Bones,” a cop said, gagging.
As Octavia had a perfectly warm heart, the chill that ran through it caused her to feel sick. Octavia was beside herself with fear and of course could not look. She could not believe that she had allowed herself to be present at such ugliness. She stepped away from the furnace.
“Most cities are built on bones,” said Pocantico Hills. “But never mind that. Where are the rent tapes?”
Cosgrove jumped up the cement steps, pulled one tape drum from under his coat, and shoved it into Great Big’s mouth like a wafer. The first crunch stopped everybody. The tape drum clearly was damaged beyond repair. Great Big dropped it to the floor. Cosgrove held the other drum up and Great Big opened his mouth as wide as a whale’s; one chew and the whole system, employing so many, producing so much, was gone.
“What do you want?” Pocantico Hills said.
“We won the roof!” Baby Rock yelled.
Disco Girl clapped. “We won the roof and you didn’t give it to us!”
Cosgrove jabbed a finger at Pocantico Hills. “Disco Girl won the lottery for a house and this man Feinberg wouldn’t give it to her because she is not legally married.”
“I don’t understand this at all,” Pocantico Hills said.
Octavia Ripley Havermeyer suddenly found herself, once again in command of a situation. “I won’t waste any time reciting the facts. I shall tell you what I think. One, the regulation requires marriage. It is a pro-family rule, the house lottery.”
“Disco Girl is not married, but Baby Rock’s name is on the winning ticket,” Cosgrove said. “And he is legally married to Seneca. I married them myself. This man Feinberg simply decided not to award the house.”
On the steps, Baby Rock held up a marriage license. “It be like a big driver’s license.”
“Then it only requires Mr. Feinberg to sign off on the lottery result.” Octavia called to another one of David Rockefeller’s lackeys. “Could somebody find where Mr. Feinberg is now?”
“He be right behind you.”
Octavia glanced into the furnace, closed her eyes for just this little moment, and said, “Very well. I shall sign off for him. Does that satisfy everybody? You get your house.”
“That should do it,” Cosgrove said.
Sarah Carter hung over the wood banister and screeched, “Don’t be a fool, Cosgrove. One on one they fix anything. They refuse to fix the whole. Try for the whole.”
“Maybe I won’t be just settlin’ for an apartment,” Disco Girl said.
“She’s right. Hold out. We can win,” Sarah said.
“Oh sure. Man against tank,” Bushwick said.
“Tell him to bite down hard on the tape and destroy the system,” Sarah said.
“You can’t do that or all the people will have no place to live,” Bushwick said.
Sarah pointed in anger at Bushwick. “Don’t listen to him,” Sarah said.
Pocantico Hills waved and the Vatican delegate came down off the wood stairs and stood alongside him. “I know there has been a misunderstanding and it would have been so much easier for all of us if I had contacted you properly. But all this can be rectified. For now we truly do need your report.”
“Yes,” Cosgrove said, “but my report is not what it originally would have been. I have learned from the birds, just as certainly as if Saint Francis of Assisi had sent them to teach me. I know now that the problem in this country is the Poor, wh—”
“The Poor! They are our only property! You cannot do away with the Poor. Why, we would have no church. We need the Poor. On behalf of His Holiness, I command you to return their belongings to these people and to give me your report immediately. I will stand here and both collect the tapes and hear your report.”
Cosgrove, standing there, holding this one thought of his own, perhaps the first idea of his life that was not tied solely to a rule of his religion, considered all this for a moment. He weighed a new belief against a command from his institution. Cosgrove’s chin rose, his eyes blazed at the group about him, and he chanted, “In vitro fertilization! Surrogate mothers! Either they have too much sex in this country or they go the other way and they want babies without sex.
That is the ultimate confusion in this country. And I have the answer.”
“What is it?”
“Ripped condoms! Sperm and egg can be mixed in a dish like an omelette and put straight back into the womb and be blessed by God, providing that the man has not masturbated. What he must do then is to wear a condom. Oh, I am sorry to use the word but I must, for he can only wear a ripped condom. If he uses an unripped condom, that is birth control and that is most sinful of all, next to abortion and masturbation. With my ripped condom, he can have heavenly union with his lawfully married wife and immediately afterwards rush that remainder of his sperm in the pocket of the condom if there are any to the doctor’s office. Think of it. This overcomes all objections. He is not using a contraceptive if it is broken. He is not masturbating. He is mated in deepest love with his wife and because of a physical defect the sperm cannot reach the egg and fertilize it unless there is help from modern science. So I have done it. I have made the connection. I have the answer to at least one part of America’s great and only problem.”
“Marvelous,” the Papal delegate said.
“You are truly a demented man,” Sarah Carter yelled.
Pocantico Hills said to Cosgrove, “You are a genius.”
“Am I? How jolly.”
“Now let me have the tape.”
“Of course,” Cosgrove said, reaching inside his coat.
“And tell the cannibal to behave,” the police commissioner said. “We are going to put leg irons on his wrists.”
“On Great Big?”
“Oh yes,” Pocantico Hills said. “Look what this big fellow of yours has done. We must commit him immediately so the tale never gets out.”
Cosgrove and Great Big were up the cement steps and into the yard in back of the church, on the edge of the high weeds. Great Big went ahead too far and Cosgrove was running furiously, so he could shove the second drum, the backup drum, into Great Big’s mouth and let him eat it like a wafer. At which point an oversized police emergency service truck, lit like a jukebox, tried to run down Great Big, who plunged into the bullrushes.
All the police and agents from everywhere now chased Cosgrove, who held the backup tape drum under his arm. He cut to the left. Men in suits, probably federal agents, closed in. He headed to the right. Uniformed police went for him. One obviously had athletic training, football probably, for he did not move as Cosgrove ran at him and suddenly tried to veer off, to fake the man out of the way. The uniformed cop stood with his feet rooted, arms out. He would not be faked and this gave Cosgrove no more running room. Cosgrove put the drum in the crook of his wrist like a discus, and he whirled. Whirling, whirling, whirling, gathering speed and strength from the speed flowing into his arm, and as hands tore at Cosgrove, he bellowed and, rocking his body as Jim Sheridan of Mayo did in the All-Ireland Games at Croke Park in Dublin, Cosgrove threw the drum into the air like a discus, and soar it did and spin it did, wonderfully high and moving with such speed that in midair the cover came off and the computer tape went into the air like a ribbon, miles of tape billowing in the air, snaking through the sky and landing in the bullrushes, draping the high weeds like decorations on an endless Christmas tree. There was a shriek. Those hands not pummeling Cosgrove on the ground were sent into the weeds to gather carefully, so carefully, the tape. The head of the computer room was there to rewind it with his personal hands. Nobody did anything else. Great Big was forgotten as they tended to Cosgrove and the tape.
“What do we do with this man?” one of the commissioners said, looking at Cosgrove.
“Punish him.”
“How?”
“Send him home.”
“Ireland,” Cosgrove said numbly.
&nb
sp; At Kennedy Airport, three federal immigration agents put him in his seat on the plane at 8:00 P.M., and only when the plane whined off into the night and flew through the dark sky to Shannon in the West of Ireland, in the rain, did the immigration agents leave.
Great Big would be impossible to find, the police felt, because he could simply run into any black neighborhood and be another basketball star, of which they all look alike whether in a park or in the professional leagues. Still, Great Big remains on the most-wanted list because, in the history of New York City, he was the first and only cannibal who was black.
A Biography of Jimmy Breslin
Jimmy Breslin (1928–2017) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and one of the most prominent columnists in the United States. Known for his straightforward reporting style that relates major news to the common man, Breslin published more than a dozen books of fiction and nonfiction, in addition to writing columns for newspapers such as the New York Daily News and Newsday.
Born in Queens, New York, Breslin began his long newsroom career in the 1940s, lying about his age to get a job as a copyboy at the Long Island Press. He got his first column in 1963, at the New York Herald Tribune, where he won national attention by covering John F. Kennedy’s assassination from the emergency room in the Dallas Hospital and, later, from the point of view of the President’s gravedigger at Arlington Cemetery. He also provided significant coverage of the civil rights turmoil raging in the South, and was an early opponent of the Vietnam War.
In 1969, Breslin ran for city council president on Norman Mailer’s mayoral ticket. The two campaigned on a platform arguing for statehood for New York City and for banning private cars in Manhattan, among other issues. Breslin placed fifth in the primary election, garnering eleven percent of the vote. He later quipped that he was “mortified to have taken part in a process that required bars to be closed,” referring to a law in place at the time that prohibited the sale of liquor on election days.
In the early 1970s, Breslin retired from newspaper journalism to write books, beginning with The Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight (1970), a national bestseller that was adapted into a 1971 film starring Robert De Niro and Jerry Orbach. By this time Breslin had also published Sunny Jim (1962), about legendary racehorse trainer Jim Fitzsimmons, and Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? (1963), about the disastrous first season of the New York Mets baseball team. He also wrote How the Good Guys Finally Won (1976), about the Watergate Scandal and Nixon’s subsequent impeachment, a prevalent topic for him in the early 1970s.
Breslin returned to column-writing later in the decade, taking jobs first at the New York Daily News, then at Newsday. As always, he covered the city by focusing on ordinary people as well as larger-than-life personalities. His intimate knowledge of cops, Mafia dons, and petty thieves provided fodder for his columns. In the late 1970s, his profile was so high that Son of Sam killer David Berkowitz sent him letters, to boast about and publicize his crimes.
Known for being one of the best-informed journalists in the city, Breslin’s years of insightful reporting won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1986, awarded for “columns which consistently champion ordinary citizens.” Among the work cited when he received the Pulitzer were his early columns on the victims of AIDS and his exposé on the stun-gun torture of a suspected drug dealer by police in Queens. Although he stopped writing his weekly column for Newsday in 2004, Breslin continued writing books, producing nearly two dozen throughout his life. These include collections of his best columns titled The World of Jimmy Breslin (1969) and The World According to Jimmy Breslin (1988). He passed away in 2017 at the age of eighty-eight.
Breslin as a young man with his sister Diedre.
Breslin writing at home in Forest Hills, Queens.
Breslin chats with Robert F. Kennedy, who was campaigning in Los Angeles during the 1968 presidential race.
Breslin (right) and columnist Red Smith both writing for the New York Herald Tribune during the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968.
Breslin in Ireland in 1971, while writing World Without End, Amen.
Breslin with Bella Abzug, a New York congresswoman and social activist.
Letters from David Berkowitz, a.k.a. Son of Sam, delivered to Breslin at the New York Daily News offices. Son of Sam sent letters to Breslin during his killing spree in New York City in the summer of 1977. These letters were later used in the Spike Lee film Summer of Sam (2008).
Breslin with grandson Dillon Breslin in June 1980.
Breslin in the New York Daily News offices with publisher Jim Hogue (left) and editor Gil Spencer (right) after the announcement of the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1986.
Breslin (far left) with the crew of his television show, Jimmy Breslin’s People, and Speaker of the House of Representatives Tip O'Neill (fourth from right) in 1986.
The Breslin family in 1989.
Breslin with columnists David Anderson (left) and Murray Kempton (right) at a book party for Damon Runyon: A Life in New York City, 1991.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1988 by Rodene Enterprises, Inc.
cover design by Mimi Bark
978-1-4532-4540-8
This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media
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JIMMY BRESLIN
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He Got Hungry and Forgot His Manners Page 24